These 1950’s bongos with pearlized crushed ice wrap and heavy chrome hardware have been beaten on just about every song I ever wrote.  If it weren’t for their bone crushing girth they would be in my suitcase right now as I’m on my way up to northern CA. to finish six songs with Pomplamoose.

Despite having sold over 50 million records I still have never learned how to play, which always makes for a very interesting experiment when I collaborate. It’s rare that I leave my own studio and the over 500 percussion instruments that are in there because the easiest thing for me to do when I hear a melody in my head or some kind of repetitive lyric is to walk over to something like these bongos and start filling in rhythm.

I was drawn to Pomplamoose when I heard them do my song “September”.

I’ve seen trillions of versions of this song and no one gets within a continent of Earth Wind & Fire. But Pomplamoose dissected that thing like a frog and reconstructed something inventive and fun so I did what I never do, I tracked them down and asked if they wanted to make records together.

We got together for four days in December and got great starts on six songs, filming for the videos as we went.

I’m completely spontaneous. I don’t really plan anything when it comes to music or art. I just go with the first thing in my head or under my fingers which are usually these bongos and songs start to build from there.

I video everything and Pomplamoose videos every final take. Between all of us we had 40 hours of footage at the end of the four days.

I’m only taking one of my three HD cameras this trip but there’s also tripods to lug, plus enough tapes to let the camera roll for three days,  3 still cameras, my MacBook, iPad, 2 mobile phones,  6 travel drives, three digital tape recorders, cords for every conceivable configuration, not to mention my clothes -  I’m not the type who can wear one outfit for three days despite the fact that I’ll never be leaving the studio. My one regret is that there’s no room for the sacred bongos to come along.

I used to actively collect figurative sculptures made out of plastic fruits and vegetables. Largely crafts projects, I loved them because most of them were so completely stupid looking but you could always tell a lot of love went into making them. I eventually stopped collecting these anthropomorphic fruit and vegetable people because in order to stand up straight most of them were made out of really light, cheap plastic food that would crack after a couple of  years leaving them looking like accident victims. Much like what happens to actual vegetables that I periodically have a conscience to buy only to end up jamming them down the disposal when they start curdling and smelling up the frig because they’ve gotten too old to eat. But as with anything, I love when things have dual purposes like plastic fruit for display/plastic fruit for body parts. Like what a great shape an apple makes for a head or how natural the sprouts on the top of an onion look for hair.  And until now, that’s how I prefered to experience vegetables.

But a few nights ago I ended up staying up most of the night after stumbling on this guy on YouTube who also makes excellent use of vegetables for purposes other than which they were grown. Here he is playing a cucumber trumpet:

I’ve never heard a carrot used as a pan-flute before:

This would definitely be a way to get me to pay attention to broccoli:

Cabbage is one vegetable I actually like though I prefer it as cole slaw or with corn beef at a good deli. I’ve never experienced it in concert as a  flute.

Both apples and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” annoyed me as a kid. They still do.

I’m used to radishes being little round red things that I actually like but I guess if I knew they could be used as musical instruments I could wrap my mouth around this one too:

I have no idea what a butterbur is but it’s leafy and would probably taste good on top of a hamburger.

I’ve never had trouble with scallions as I love them in tuna fish salad.

I may have a Grammy and songs I’ve written may have sold over 50 million records but I can’t blow a watermelon and make it sound like a clarinet no matter how strong my musical proclivities are.  I suppose there’s nothing to stop me from trying but in the meantime I’m doing fine without adding this skill to my repertoire and I’m just going to enjoy my fruits and vegetables as really cute plastic people.

Pomplamoose tunes are so hot and I hate to dial it back to simmer but all will be boiling in June when we get together and pick up where we left off in December.

Today I spent all day watching tv because no one knew I was home.

I’m supposed to be traveling today but won’t know if I’m going until a couple hours before the flight due to complications on my collaborator’s side. I’m not the world’s most eager traveler to begin with but having a suitcase that makes me smile every time I look at it sure helps if one is of the nature that their traveling psyche can be affected by aesthetics.

In three weeks I’m throwing a party/AIDS Project of LA fundraiser to introduce the Kitsch Pop art of John Lloyd Young, to whom the musical I co-wrote, The Color Purple, lost the Tony to the musical in which he starred and won a Tony for, Jersey Boys.

None of which is relevant at all to the Disco suitcases or Pomplamoose, who I’m supposed to be recording with should I actually get on the plane today, other than the chances of me leaving town before the party if I don’t leave this week are grim. But I love working with Pomplamoose and keeping my Disco suitcases packed will keep the flame burning under the pieces of six songs we wrote and recorded together back in December and have been trying to finish ever since.

I first saw Pomplamoose on YouTube when they did my song, “September”.

I’ve seen trillions of versions of “September” and no one gets within a continent of Earth Wind & Fire (where my percussion obsession began and what gave me a permanent seat in the vortex of Disco). But Pomplamoose dissected that thing like a frog and reconstructed something inventive and fun so I did what I never do, I tracked them down and asked if they wanted to make records together.

I’m a percussion freak and the rhythmic places Pomplamoose goes is very exciting when one thinks about all the pockets a percussion crazy person like me can drop sonic seasoning into. So here’s what my Disco suitcases are packed with for my trip:

I loved and still love Disco, not at all a Pomplamoose thing but very much an Allee influence when when thinking about making great Pop records. An incredibly amped and happy state of mind fueled by music that melodically and rhythmically is the equivalent of 48 sets of little feet attached to your heart and racing you over the finish line of Pop Soul.

Disco, and my suitcases as representatives of it, still make me feel good even if I don’t feel good about not knowing whether I’m traveling or not today. We shall arrive whenever the time is right and pick up on the exact bass note we left off on. Of that you can be sure!

that

This was a gift from Michael Patrick King, writer and director of Sex and the City, a couple of years ago for my birthday. I always thought the doll had a Carrie Bradshaw vibe to her, smiling and happy and looking good in red.  One day I slammed my shin into the table Rolly Polly sits on and it made such a great chime sound I didn’t mind the dripping gash down below.  I limped into my recording studio and dragged a mic to reach her, tilting her in all directions, spinning her  around and pushing her across the table. The different chime patterns sounded great and distinctive, sometimes carrying on for 30 seconds or more.

I love working with tracks I record just by banging on things around my house. This is nothing a skilled or trained musician would do but my specialty is hearing rhythm and time in places most people don’t. As my Color Purple collaborators used to say, “All aboard for Willisville!” as I continually heard things in different time signatures they thought a piece of music was in and never cared about working off of a grid, preferring instead for everything to play as it lays, natural and funky.  I love things that lazily and organically hang together and this little Roly Poly girl doesn’t disappoint.  I doubt MPK thought he was giving me a musical instrument for my birthday but that’s exactly what she’s become.

If you ever get a chance to knock one of these gals around I hope you do. She makes one of the happiest sounds in the world.

Battered and rusty, this vintage 30’s noisemaker still exhibits signs of life with a great hardwood-ball-against-tin sound that I still use as percussion on a lot of my songs. I suspect that the artist who did the graphic didn’t know a lot about music though as this is quite a peculiar figuration for a jazz combo. Sans piano and bass, there’s but a guitarist and drummer accompanying the three-piece horn section, the middle horn of which looks more like the end of a hookah than the trombone it probably should have been. I also love the little muscle man with the A-bomb afro hovering under the band, stylistically completely inconsistent with the rest of the figures. All of which means this noisemaker firmly hacks a deep notch in the belt of Kitsch.

This thing kills me. Not only does it still reek of the scent of the powder that was pumped into it five decades ago but it exemplifies a common marketing tactic taken by some of the most brilliantly kitschy products when a staunchly middle of the road company attempts to be hip and takes on a pop culture trend. In this case, it’s The Fuller Brush Company attempting to cash in on the folk singing craze of the early 1960s by covering a bath mit in fabric that looks like something that would have been stretched over the armrest of an Ethan Allan Early Americana couch.

I don’t even know what half of the instruments are let alone what a Declaration of Independence type scroll, leaves or half of the other icons on this have to do with Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary or anyone else who  inspired teenagers and young adults to buy acoustic guitars, don turtlenecks and rip into a chorus of “If I Had A Hammer”.

The box is as brilliant as the mitt. I love the backdrop of musical notes, although I have no idea what the melody is as despite the copious number of hit songs I’ve written I don’t know how to read music. But that story’s for another time. What’s important here is the illustration of a pert and sunny sorority looking girl who’s more apt to be dancing in front of her TV with American Bandstand on than attending a Hootenanny while she’s being serenaded by the Ray-Ban man and  someone else whose pants are way too short.

Lawrence Welk was always too square for me except that that’s where I could continue to get my Mickey Mouse Club fix when, in 1961, Mouseketeer Bobby Burgess won a dance contest to Welk’s hit, “Calcutta” and became a regular on the show two years after the mouse ears left the air. Though Bobby went from being a hip kid to an excessively corny adult as soon as he hitched to Mr. Wunnerful Wunnerful’s wonderful wagon, I still appreciated his move as otherwise I may have missed Lawrence Welk and his jaw droppingly cheesy production numbers that became a primer in my neverending education in Kitsch. Combine that with the fact that I never learned how to play an instrument and you end up with my excitement about these musical spoons which became one of the first instruments I “played” when I started to write songs.

Forget the spoons, the packaging on this is fantastic. With not an inch left uncovered, it boasts “Get on the beat!”, “Be a champion!”and “The international pastime – spooning!” Perhaps so, but not that kind of spooning.

Bobby Burgess went on to become Welk’s longtime accordionist, Myron Floren’s, son-in law. Here they are doing The Chicken Dance, which, according to them, is “one of the most popular dances in America” and which, according to me, “wasn’t”.

Here’s Welk’s biggest and only Top 10 hit, “Calcutta”:

It was the 21st night of September, the opening line of my very first hit song as well as the date of the grand opening party at LA’s Ghettogloss celebrating the launch of AWMoK.com, The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch, my mini social network and ongoing exhibit of all things Kitsch. I am SO NOT the type to get up at a party and perform my own songs but this was the night that tradition broke.

As it was a special night in my musical history being “the 21st night of September” as well as a night to celebrate Kitsch with a kapitol K, I decided to let anyone who wanted to sing do bad karaoke versions of “September”. I also brought a bunch of rickety, thrift-shop-bought instruments with me – a knockoff Beatles Apollo bass with three strings, a 1981 Casio keyboard with 2 1/2 octaves and a missing middle C. key – just in case any of the famous musicians in attendance might want to play along, my style.

As any of you familiar with me know, I’m a massive fan of smooshing together very high and very low elements of art that most people would create, perform or perpetuate in very different spaces and times. But I live for those moments where the incredible thinking, technology and execution at the top collide with the passion, dedication and mixed results talent at the bottom. 

Moments like these have allowed me to see some of my Greatest Hits performed by the best and the worst at once. Like when my discoveries, The Del Rubio Triplets, octogenarian identical triplets in miniskirts and go-go boots and of questionable musical prowess, performed “Neutron Dance” with The Pointer Sisters the very week the record entered the Top 10. I’m elated to report that the 21st night of September a couple of weeks ago was an opportunity for another such hi/lo performance. 

In walks Larry Dunn, original Earth Wind & Fire keyboard player extraordinaire who played on every significant EWF hit, and Verdine White, cofounding member who’s still in EWF, greatest bass player who ever lived and the man who discovered me and brought me to the group back in 1978. And there’s Luenell, hysterical off-color comedienne who is literally the #1 Earth Wind & Fire fan in the world. She carries their Greatest Hits CD with her wherever she goes and watches the EWF Collection DVD every day, swear to God. She’s been in love with Larry Dunn since she first caught sight of his perfectly carved Afro in the early 1970s. 

Here are three 6 minute videos documenting one of the best times I’ve ever had in my life at a party. Part 1 is the set up, where Luenell meets her idols and I announced that anyone who has the balls to sing “September” with Earth Wind & Fire in the house is welcome to do so. Part 2 is us doing “September” and Part 3 is “Boogie Wonderland”.

I have video cameras going almost every minute of the day. It’s moments like these that would never translate unless you were there to see them that make me thankful I spend every dime I earn on tape, cameras and people to point them.

Last thing I’ll say here is to make sure and go to AWMoK.com, the reason everyone came to celebrate and where so many people have gone to keep the party going ever since.

Part 1 – Getting ready to sing:

Part 2 – “September”:

Part 3 – “Boogie Wonderland”:

How I’ve sold 50,000,000 records and still don’t know how to read, notate or play music is in part because of these beer can shakers. I can always rattle them into some groove that I can hum a melody or write a lyric to. See, all it takes is some uncooked beans and rice knocking around inside some vintage tin. I’ll have some Rheingold with that beat please! Works everytime.